The art of appropriation

A lot of the time, art students will copy the old masters to get better at painting and fix their technique. So I thought, I’m going to give this a go and copy Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus – and while I’m at it, I’m just going to make Venus brown and make her look like someone I know. I didn’t really have words at the time to say why I was doing that – I was just drawn to it.
That was almost ten years ago – I’ve continued to [create those paintings], and now I have more words to explain why. When I was doing my degree, I saw a lack of Aboriginal people being depicted in paintings in a positive light. Say I had an assignment and I had to look up work by Aboriginal artists – it was mainly traditional art [with a few exceptions], like Gordon Bennett and Vernon Ah Kee, but nothing that I felt really represented me as a young Aboriginal girl who didn’t grow up on Country. So I tried to find a way to connect to Culture, but I wasn’t taught how to do traditional Aboriginal art, dot painting or Wiradjuri painting, so I thought, ‘This [re-creation of famous works] will be my style.’
My master’s is based on the Aunty Collection and the ideas behind it. It delves into the history of how Aboriginal people have been represented: what creates a representation of someone, what goes into it, how society responds and how that shapes the way we’re seen today.